Thierry Noir is the man to whom we owe the longest concrete painting in the world. His paintings, with their bright colors and their melancholy poetry, represent nowadays the art of the Berlin wall. His wall works survived longer than all the others even after the fall of the wall in 1989. Thierry Noir was born in 1958 in Lyon, France. He came to Berlin in January of 1982 with two small suitcases, attracted by the music of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who lived in West-Berlin at this time. From April 1984, he and Christophe Bouchet started to paint the Berlin wall. As the years went by, the paintings took on phenomenal proportions which were rapidly recognised by the international arts community. The object was not to embelish the wall but to demystify it. The paintings of Thierry Noir became a symbol of new found freedom after the reunification of Germany and the end of the cold war.